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5 Responses to “Occupation 101”

[…] Occupation 101 Published November 6th, 2007 activism , apartheid , documentary , film , israel , middle east , occupation , palestine , video This week is Palestine Solidarity week at Manchester University. It’s been an annual event, I gather, since our union was twinned with An-Najah in the West Bank, and this year it has been timed to coincide with the international Week against the Apartheid Wall. The lads who organise the popular Monday night documentaries kicked the week off with this film, which I will now lovingly repost from Throw Away Your Telescreen. […]

This blanket excuse of violence introduces Occupation 101, a propaganda film designed to evoke sympathy for Palestinians and contempt for Israel, which is currently being promoted to schools, churches and activist groups. What follows is ninety minutes of indoctrination. Scenes of squalid refugee camps, Israeli soldiers confronting protesters, despairing Palestinian mothers and teary-eyed children serve as a backdrop to well-rehearsed indictments of the Jewish state by a who’s who of anti-Israel activists. Narrator Alison Weir and the producer/director team of Sufyan and Abdallah Omeish present a litany of anti-Zionist canards. The message throughout is that Palestinians are blameless victims while Israelis are entirely responsible for Palestinian violence.

Occupation 101’s worst offense is its twisting of the history and facts of the conflict in order to equate the Palestinian cause with celebrated civil rights struggles around the world. Viewers are led to see the situation of the Palestinians as parallel to black South Africans under apartheid or southern blacks during the civil rights era. To pull this off, a decade of unprecedented terrorism directed at Israelis in their homes, cafes, vehicles and religious festivals is made nearly invisible, severing the connection between Israeli measures — like house demolitions and sweeps through Palestinian villages — and the Palestinian attacks that precipitated them. This is essential to the film’s portrayal of Israeli actions as colonialist aggression rather than as a response to terrorism. The hate indoctrination that permeates Arab society and produces cadres of young Palestinian suicide bombers groomed in hatred, intolerance and rejection of peaceful coexistence is swept under the carpet.

Ray Noctonsaid

Samuel, you are right, there should be no comparison between apartheid South Africa and Gaza / West Bank, purely because the plight of the Palestinians is far far worse than that suffered by black South Africans, at least they weren’t attacked by F-16’s and gunship helicopters. As for indoctrination, look no further than Israeli schools. The whole world, apart from people like yourself, know what’s going on in Palestine, stop deluding yourself.

Dave, The Void On Firesaid

The comparison (between Zionism and apartheid) is instructive. For me, the biggest difference lies not in which regime is worse (though several prominent veterans of the SA struggle against apartheid would agree with you, Ray) but in the economic relationship. The racial segregation of apartheid was very much a way of better exploiting Black people’s (and, through the logic of divide and conquer, poorer White people’s) labour.
In the OPT-Israel, faced with the “Labour Zionism” of old or the corporatist military-industrial growth industry of the last decade, the Palestinians are not so much there to be exploited as there to be excluded, or ideally removed altogether. This is perhaps more sinister, but certainly calls for different kinds of resistance.